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Scaling the ‘Wall in the Head’

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Walls are back in fashion. Walls and fences. Not long ago, you may recall, Republican presidential candidates expressed their devotion to them. In October Michele Bachmann signed a pledge to support the construction of a fence that would run the entire length of the United States-Mexico border. Not to be outdone, Herman Cain voiced his support for an electrified border fence, one juiced up enough to be lethal: Touch it and die. As someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, I happen to know how the device works; in a certain way, we invented it (we should have copyrighted it). The ability to cross the “lethal fence” used to be part of the East-European survival kit.

The walls erected at borders protect people not from barbarians, but from anxieties and fears.

Of course, the issue has not gone away. Immigration was once again a third-rail topic in the most recent Republican debate. A visual message appeared this week in the media to reinforce it: The latest cover of The New Yorker magazine is a Thanksgiving-themed illustration by the artist Christoph Niemann that shows frightened Mayflower-era pilgrims breaching a barbed-wire fence in the desert.
While walls and fences are certainly physical things — imposing ones at that — a good deal of their power comes from elsewhere. As their role in political discourse makes clear, they are also things of the mind. And it is not a concept confined by American borders. The Germans, who seem to have a name for everything, use the phrase Mauer im Kopf (“wall in the head”) to refer to the phenomenon. The Berlin Wall may have been torn down long ago, but many people in Germany still feel divided; the wall is intact in their minds. (As a native of Germany, Niemann may know a thing or two about this.) Walls can be spectacular as architectural structures but they can be even more fascinating as entities that inhabit our thinking and shape cultures.

Walls, then, are built not for security, but for a sense of security. The distinction is important, as those who commission them know very well. What a wall satisfies is not so much a material need as a mental one. Walls protect people not from barbarians, but from anxieties and fears, which can often be more terrible than the worst vandals. In this way, they are built not for those who live outside them, threatening as they may be, but for those who dwell within. In a certain sense, then, what is built is not a wall, but a state of mind.

In a world of uncertainty and confusion, a wall is something to rely on; something standing right there, in front of you — massive, firm, reassuring. With walls come mental comfort, tranquility and even a vague promise of happiness. Their sheer presence is a guarantee that, after all, there is order and discipline in the world. A wall signifies the victory of geometrical reason over anarchic impulses. What can be greater than a straight line that crosses deserts, forests, swift rivers, unruly cities and ungovernable provinces? A straight line is not only the shortest distance between two points, but also the cheapest way to build a wall. Walls are geometry put into humanity’s service. True, they create divisions and distinctions, but so does reason. Walls make things look clear and distinct; they are always Cartesian. Seen from space, the Great Wall of China is one of the very few indications that the Earth is inhabited by rational beings (if we leave aside the visible traces of industrial pollution, that is).

Granted, walls can also block one’s view, but that should not be such big problem, especially when one wants to hide. At closer inspection, a wall occasions a dual process. On one hand, by building a wall I try to hide myself, to live in its shadow and, at the limit, make myself invisible. On the other, however, it is precisely by building it that I come to disclose myself in a decisive manner. Through the erection of the wall I expose myself totally; my secret fears and anxieties can now be contemplated in all their nakedness. A wall is above all the admission of a fundamental vulnerability.

Leif Parsons

Now, if we shift perspective and look at things from the point of view of those who are “left out” (walled off), a wall is always perceived as an invitation. It is a way of putting things in a more tempting light, of making them desirable. This is all a game of teasing and seduction. There used to be nothing here, and then, one day, suddenly a wall emerges. How can you not pay attention? The erection of a wall signifies that someone has got something precious and that the others should know about it. That she has erected the wall means, at a first reading, that she does not want to share with others whatever she’s got; however, to the extent that by building the wall she lets the others know of her new possession, it means that she may want to share after all. And that’s the point of the whole game.

As we have learned from René Girard, this is precisely how desires are born: I desire something by way of imitation, because someone else already has it. This explains why walls are so attractive and also why they are besieged, eventually torn down and apart. They are just irresistible. It took the Ottomans several generations to breach the walls of Constantinople. They were incredibly stubborn, these old Turks; they persisted in their effort to the point of settling down, setting up small towns right there, next to the city walls. But they were not without help; their determination fed every single day on the sight of those Constantinopolitan walls, which made the city ever more tempting and the desire to conquer it irrepressible.

Walls are built for various reasons and they serve different purposes, but their function is always fundamentally the same: to create divisions, to prevent people and ideas from moving freely, and to legitimize differences. In the end, it does not even matter whether a wall has been erected by people who are afraid of losing some of what they possess (the most frequent situation) or governments — like the East German state that built the Berlin Wall — afraid of losing their people who, in the absence of any walls, would gladly go elsewhere. Once the wall has been erected, it acquires a life of its own and structures people’s lives according to its own rules. It gives them meaning and a new sense of direction. All those walled off now have a purpose: to find themselves, by whatever means it takes, on the other side of the wall.

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When Hadrian erected the wall in what is today Northern England in the second century, all those left north of it discovered an interesting new destination: south of the wall. When the Berlin Wall was built up in 1961, people in East Germany must have suddenly realized that there was a place absolutely worth going to: West Berlin. For almost 30 years the Wall fueled their desire to be on the other side. For many of them this desire was so irresistible that they had to give in, whatever the risks; enough died trying.

Without walls, we would all certainly die of boredom. That’s why, if we don’t find them in the real world, we have to invent them. In Luis Buñuel’s film “El Ángel Exterminador” a group of people find themselves mysteriously trapped in a room after a party. As the times goes by, they reveal their deeper selves. Also, their predicament becomes terrible: some go as far as to commit suicide, one dies, all do things through which they profoundly degrade themselves. After they reach the lowest point, somehow they manage to get out. It is then they learn that the wall that had kept them trapped existed only in their own minds. The film was made in Mexico, of all places.

On a large historical scale, walls must be a blessing. And not only for the remarkable — if unuttered — philosophical and cross-cultural conversation that takes place continuously between those who built walls, on one hand, and those who want to tear them down, on the other. Above all, walls help keep the world alive and history in motion. A wall is always a provocation, and life is possible only as a response to provocations; a world without walls would soon become stale and dry. After all, history itself may be nothing more than an endless grand-scale game where some built walls only for others to tear them down; the better the former become at wall-building the braver the latter get at wall-tearing. The sharpening of these skills must be what we call progress.

Correction: November 28, 2011An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Great Wall of China is the only visible indication that the Earth is inhabited by rational beings. It is not the only indication visible; it is one of very few.

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.